Role of leadership and labor education in organizing southern hosiery workers

Rogin describes the role of leading negotiators such as Scott Hoyman, Roy Lawrence, and Julius Fry in the organization of textile workers in the South from the 1930s into the 1950s. In addition, Rogin explains how labor education was central to organizing efforts. Of particular interest is his description of education workshops held for workers throughout the South. The purpose of these, according to Rogin, was to educate workers about the background of their industry and to give them confidence about their value as workers.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Lawrence Rogin, November 2, 1975. Interview E-0013. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

WILLIAM FINGER:

He's now become one of the best negotiators for the union.

LAWRENCE ROGIN:

Yes. He learned under a good man, except he has a little more
flexibility. That's one of the tragedies of the union, that,
in a sense—this is one thing I saw when I went South in
T.W.O.C. before T.W.U.A… Roy Lawrence was a southern director
for the union. And Roy was a printer, and the printers make a big thing
out of contracts, you know. Do you know any of their contracts? And
getting the right language is what's important, and so on.
Julius Fry came out of Lumberton and became a staff rep for the union,
and became very close to Roy, and Roy trained him. And Julius then
became a very good man on language—in a sense, a very good
contract administrator. But he never—neither he nor
Roy—could ever attract a member to the union. They would win
them benefits, but it would be lifeless. And so in a sense, I think (I
was out of the union by the time the Henderson strikes took place) but I
think it's Julius's efficiency really brought
those strikes, because he'd take these damn arbitration cases
and he'd win them all. And that was what the guy was sore
about.

WILLIAM FINGER:

That's right.

LAWRENCE ROGIN:

And anybody who's willing to put up the money can beat the
union in a strike; I think any company in any industry could.
I'm not sure about that. But I saw a
small company beat the auto workers in a Detroit suburb when I was out
in Michigan, and so if they can be beat in Detroit, then I guess any
company can beat a union that really wants to. And that's
what happened in Henderson, of course. And Scott was trained by Julius,
and he was a good negotiator. I used to argue with Scott all the time
about the relative merits of the good contract or the membership.
I'm always a believer in: you get the members and let the
contract take care of itself. I suppose I go to the other extreme. Scott
would really be arguing about it with Julius.

WILLIAM FINGER:

What did you do with your time as education director? How did your days
go?

LAWRENCE ROGIN:

Oh well, when you went South, you know… It was a whole big
program, you know; a hell of a lot of it was administration. But if you
went South … well, we ran institutes. We used to run them all
over the South, one-week institutes. And we used to go into towns and
run them. We used to run them during organizing campaigns, or run them
during strikes (combining, you know, with educational work).

WILLIAM FINGER:

What would you do at an institute? How would it go?

LAWRENCE ROGIN:

Well, it would be just like all the others that everybody's
ever run—a little different, maybe, one way or another,
but… Say if it was during an organizing campaign then
we'd be running them, say, for a week during the campaign,
the evenings: something of the history of the unions, something on the
condition of the industry, something on what the union's like
when it's in existence (what stewards do, what officers do),
to give them a feeling of confidence that they could… This is
the big thing of all textile workers, because they're always
low paid, North and South, and there's
not really much difference——a little different for
synthetic yarn because of their backgrounds—in their feeling
of incompetency to deal with the employer. And that's true of
all low-paid workers, I think, and so you have to give them some
confidence in themselves. Try to give them some knowledge and some
confidence, and try to find leadership.

WILLIAM FINGER:

Would you work with the Southern Summer School in any way?

LAWRENCE ROGIN:

We did, as I said, with the hosiery workers. We worked with the Southern
Summer School, well, see, two periods. The one period they were really
just … they would come down in the summer and it used to be
at Asheville at the school there, and then we'd have probably
a weekend (because there was nobody organized, or very few, so you
couldn't get people to go off their jobs, but you could get
them there for a weekend). We had some organization, I guess; maybe some
people could get off—I don't remember. We did it
there and at Highlander. Then later on, when the Southern Summer School
became a kind of a traveling Chataugua kind of thing we worked with them
then; and then they used to come into textile communities and so on.